Jack Patrick Dorsey, a computer programmer and Internet entrepreneur who is the co-founder and CEO of Twitter, and Square, a mobile payments company, has finally responded why the Social media giant labelled Trump’s Tweets.
After Twitter flagged a pair of President Trump’s tweets with a fact-checking label on Tuesday, tensions between the president and his favoured social media platform are running high.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey—rarely one to pick a political fight—took to his own platform to clarify the company’s decision.
“Our intention is to connect the dots of conflicting statements and show the information in dispute so people can judge for themselves. More transparency from us is critical so folks can clearly see the why behind our actions,” Dorsey tweeted Wednesday night.
“I just believe strongly that Facebook shouldn’t be the arbiter of truth of everything that people say online. We have a different policy than Twitter on this. Private companies probably shouldn’t be, especially these platform companies, shouldn’t be in the position of doing that.” Mark Zuckerberg.
With his clarification, Dorsey linked to what Twitter calls its “civic integrity policy,” a set of rules prohibiting certain kinds of “manipulative behaviour” on the platform.
Per our Civic Integrity policy (https://t.co/uQ0AoPtoCm), the tweets yesterday may mislead people into thinking they don’t need to register to get a ballot (only registered voters receive ballots). We’re updating the link on @realDonaldTrump’s tweet to make this more clear.
— jack (@jack) May 28, 2020
Dorsey also denounced Trump’s online supporters and surrogates for going after the company’s executives, asking Twitter’s newly energized critics to please leave our employees out of this.
Fact check: there is someone ultimately accountable for our actions as a company, and that’s me. Please leave our employees out of this. We’ll continue to point out incorrect or disputed information about elections globally. And we will admit to and own any mistakes we make.
— jack (@jack) May 28, 2020
The official Twitter Safety account, the company clarified that its decision to add a fact-checking link to two of Trump’s tweets.
https://twitter.com/TwitterSafety/status/1265838824451694597?s=20
On Wednesday evening, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany told reporters the president would soon sign an executive order pertaining to social media, widely expected to be unsubstantial strike back at Twitter’s policy enforcement choices this week.
Dorsey, according to a Twitter spokesperson, did not make the decision to label Trump’s tweets. A Twitter spokesperson said the tweets contained potentially misleading information about voting processes and had been labelled to provide additional context.
Most Twitter users have also criticized the company for not going far enough with its new measures, adding that the company should have explicitly said in its label that Trump’s tweets contained false information.
